Ken Hitchcock is half the man he used to be, staying in fighting trim through his recent work with Crossfit–a vigourous workout regime, along with learning how to eat right–but it’s as much about the wait as the weight for Hitch.

He’s a hockey coach, which is why he couldn’t get to St. Louis fast enough to take their head job Sunday. Grabbed a few suits, his running shoes, his skates and made sure his car was all gassed up, with his GPS on.

“I got the call from the Blues at 3 in the afternoon and was on the road at 6:30. I don’t even know what’s in my (clothes) bag,” said the most famous United Cycle employee, who was being paid $1.33 million this year by the Columbus Blue Jackets, not to coach.

The Jackets had fired him in February of 2010 and while he says he enjoyed working with the Columbus Blue Jackets’ minor league staff and how tickled he was to have helped out the “30 ex players who are now in coaching” at either their practices or be sharing stuff on the phone, coaching is what Hitchcock lives for. He turns 60 next month, and he knows this is likely his last kick at the coaching cat, with 534 career wins (14th all-time).

It’s a young man’s coaching game, along with the teenagers and 20somethings on the ice.

A third of the NHL coaches are 45 or younger. Davis Payne, who was behind the Blues’ bench, was the fourth youngest at 41, after Minny’s Mike Yeo (38), Tampa Bay’s Guy Boucher and Dallas’s Glen Gulatzan (both 40). The oldest NHL coach is Terry Murray in LA at 61. There are only only seven coaches–Randy Carlyle (55), Tom Renney, Ron Wilson and Bruce Boudreau (56), Jacques Martin (59), Hitchcock and Murray 55 or older, just 25 percent.

But, as Blues’ GM Doug Armstrong, who worked with Hitchcock in Dallas as GM Bob Gainey’s right-hand man and with Hitchcock in the 2010 Olympics in team management when Hitchcock was one of the coaches along with Mike Babcock, Jacques Lemaire and Lindy Ruff, “Hitch has an impeccable resume.” The Blues need to win, now, at 6-7. There’s a new owner Michael Hulsizer coming in along with a part-owner Oren Koules, who used to co-own the Lightning, and Koules liked former agent Brian Lawton, his GM hire there. Armstrong has this year and next on his contract and he’s going with somebody he knows and has a history with. He didn’t hire Payne–former GM Larry Pleau did. Hitchcock

Hitchcock won a Stanley Cup in Dallas, got the Flyers to game seven of the semi-finals in Philly, got the Blue Jackets into the playoffs their one and only time in Columbus. He’s stayed current. He says he has a book on every NHL team from scouting them (in person or on TV), so if another job came up, he wouldn’t be going in cold. He’s 59 but he can relate to young players–he helped Don Hay’s Canadian junior team at their summer camp in Edmonton as an advisor. The Blues are a mix of young and old, actually.

“I have a history with (Blues) winger Jamie Langenbrunner from winning in Dallas (1999). I know Arnie (Jason Arnott). He broke my heart when I was in Dallas, too (he scored the game-winning Cup finals goal in 2000 for Jersey). I’ll never forget that,” he said with a hearty laugh. “I’ve coached some of the Blues (Chris Stewart, Alex Pietrangelo and Carlo Colaiacovo) in the world championship.”

“The game’s changed from Dallas, though. We had a veteran team, kind of slow. We were like an old dog that would let teams make mistakes and then we’d bury you. The game’s so fast now. It’s a 200-foot game. That’s what I’m going to tell the players here first.”

Hitchcock steadfastly said he had no interest in returning to the Blue Jackets to coach with Scott Arniel’s league-worst squad, maybe because nothing short of divine intervention will help that team. He says nobody ever asked him to do so, even though he was hanging out with team president Mike Priest, watching the team from luxury suites which led to the galloping speculation he was coming back.

He says he needed the time away from coaching to refresh–he used it to get in bettter shape with those strenuous Crossfit programs–and says that his golf game, which used to be very good (he was one of the better juniors in the city while one of the Riverside Rats) has taken a beating. “I dug some big holes at a lot of golf courses in Columbus,” he joked.

The Blues’ players will learn that they have to buy in to what Hitchcock’s selling, quickly. The media? They’ve got a guy who’ll fill every notebook and lots of TV time and sports talkshow time. It’s a win-win for both sides.

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